Morris is:

55 miles from the Upper Sioux Community in southwest Minnesota and 65 miles from the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota.

Located within 150 miles of six Native Nations—the Upper Sioux Community; Lower Sioux Indian Community, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and White Earth Ojibwe in Minnesota; and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and Flandreau Santee Sioux in South Dakota.

One of two universities with a federal mandate to provide a tuition-free education to American Indian students tied to grants of land and facilities from American Indian boarding schools by the US federal government.

One of the Top 200 Colleges for American Indians, according to Winds of Change

Financial support for college & resources to build financial literacy

Recognizing Our Past

The Morris campus is situated on original Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and Dakota and Lakota (Sioux) homelands. The campus was founded in 1887 as a Native American boarding school. When the US Bureau of the Interior turned over the building and lands of the boarding school to the State of Minnesota in 1909 to establish the agricultural boarding high school (1910–63), it was with the stipulation that American Indian students would be admitted on the same conditions as other students, and tuition-free.

When the Minnesota State Legislature established the Morris campus of the University of Minnesota in 1959 as a selective public liberal arts college, this same stipulation remained. These actions are legally recorded in federal law and state statute.

In the News

federally recognized American Indian tribes/Alaskan Native villages and Canadian First Nations represented at Morris

20%

of Morris students are Native

The Morris campus uses the term American Indian to refer more broadly to peoples indigenous to the United States and Canada including members and descendants of tribal nations, Alaskan native villages and corporations, and Canadian First Nations. The term Native American is used occasionally as well to reflect the same peoples as the campus is identified federally as a Native American Serving Non-Tribal Institution of higher education by the US Department of Education.